ian movement at
Oxford. William Sharp, in speaking of "that splendid outburst of
Romanticism in which Coleridge was the first and most potent
participant," and of the lapse or ebb that followed the death of
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, resumes: "At last a time came when
a thrill of expectation, of new desire, of hope, passed through the
higher lives of the nation; and what followed thereafter were the Oxford
movement in the Church of England, the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art,
and the far-reaching Gothic revival. Different as these movements were
in their primary aims, and still more differing in the individual
representations of interpreters, they were in reality closely interwoven,
one being the outcome of the other. The study of mediaeval art, which
was fraught with such important results, was the outcome of the
widespread ecclesiastical revival, which in its turn was the outcome of
the Tractarian movement in Oxford. The influence of Pugin was potent in
strengthening the new impulse, and to him succeeded Ruskin with 'Modern
Painters' and Newman with the 'Tracts for the Times.' Primarily the
Pre-Raphaelite movement had its impulse in the Oxford religious revival;
and however strange it may seem to say that such men as Holman Hunt and
Rossetti . . . followed directly in the footsteps of Newman and Pusey and
Keble, it is indubitably so." [7] Ruskin, too, cautioned his young
friends that "if their sympathies with the early artists lead them into
mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing. But I
believe there is no danger of this, at least for the strongest among
them. There may be some weak ones whom the Tractarian heresies may
touch; but if so, they will drop off like decayed branches from a strong
stem." [8] One of these weak ones who dropped off was James Collinson, a
man of an ascetic and mystical piety--like Werner or Brentano. He
painted, among other things, "The Renunciation of St. Elizabeth" from
Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy." "The picture," writes Scott, "resembled
the feckless dilettanteism of the converts who were then dropping out of
their places in Oxford and Cambridge into Mariolatry and Jesuitism. In
fact, this James Collinson actually did become Romanist, wanted to be a
priest, painted no more, but entered a seminary, where they set him to
clean the boots as an apprenticeship in humility and obedience. They did
not want him as a priest; they were already getting tire